Secret Life of Glenn Gould, The: A Genius in Love

By Michael Clarkson

Long after his death, Glenn Gould still lures new listeners to his piano, connecting with them on a haunting, personal level. “He feels and you feel,” says young New York writer Nicole Spectre. “I can feel his pain and joy – it touches me. He speaks directly to me.”

But when he was known as the world’s greatest pianist in the 1950s and 1960s, just who was Gould playing for? His audience? Himself? His demanding mother? All are likely true, but he was also richly inspired by – and bared his soul at the keyboard to – a secret society of women, the girlfriends who stirred his hard-to-fetch emotions: Franny Batchen, Verna Sandercock, Cornelia Foss, Roxolana Roslak, and Monica Gaylord.

Of the eighteen books and nineteen documentaries by or about the most compelling virtuoso of the twentieth century, none have contained details about Gould’s many love affairs and how they affected his life, his music, and his filmmaking. Until now, biographers have tried to explain what came out of the music box, not the engine that drove it. The vault to his private life has remained locked since his untimely death in 1982 because of his obsessions with privacy and controlling his image, the loyalty of his carefully chosen friends and lovers, and the choice that biographers made to focus safely on his music and eccentricities.

The Secret Life of Glenn Gould will be the first true exposé of Gould, who until now has been assumed to be asexual, lonely, and egocentric, by examining his love and soul-mate relationships. His music was twelve-tonal and his documentaries “contrapuntal” – both were filled with overlapping voices – and so was his private life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: ECW Press
• Release date: Apr 1, 2010
• ISBN: 9781554906819

Michael Clarkson

Michael Clarkson is an award-winning investigative and public-service journalist and the author of seven other nonfiction books. He is considered an authority on fear and stress, and he speaks professionally on those topics. He has appeared on many television shows as well as in the Harvey Weinstein documentary Salinger, for his rendezvous with the reclusive author. In the 1970s and ‘80s, he was a river man of some repute. Michael and his wife have two sons and two granddaughters and now live in Canada.

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life

We both fell in love talking about tranquility of spirit and we re-enforced each other’s determination to find that quality and bring it into our lives.

— Glenn Gould, writing about a woman two years before he died

INTRODUCTION

The slow, impending death of a great entertainer. It’s rare that we could actually see such a thing, but there it is, in Glenn Gould’s legendary 1981 performance of Bach’s Goldberg Variations. Fans have watched the video for decades as if it were his epitaph.

And, in a way, an epitaph is what it turned out to be.

As the camera slowly zooms in on the solitary pianist, at first we see Gould with his head all but buried in his Steinway, hunched over and getting as close to the keyboard as possible, an old man shriveling before our eyes. It is difficult to distinguish what is more compelling — the stark visual of the man or his melancholic music, slow and contemplative, surely a reflection, an outpouring of his troubled soul, a lonely artist losing control of his environment. He looks ill, as though he has taken a pounding, physically and emotionally, as though life should not have required five decades to bring him to his knees. Wearing heavy-rimmed glasses, he could be blind. And yet there is poetry to this scene — a bittersweet self-consciousness as Gould chatters and sings quietly to himself. Tender and loving is the voice from his piano. The video ends with Gould dramatically dropping his hands and, finally, his weary head. Arguably the greatest piano virtuoso of his time was expiring. And, in ways, these Goldberg Variations — a beautifully complex score written by Johann Sebastian Bach — reportedly as a charming sleeping pill in 1740 to please an insomniac Russian count — helped put Glenn Gould, age fifty, to sleep. Within seventeen months of this recording, he was dead and the album was released posthumously to rave reviews, winning a Grammy award.

History tells us that Gould died from a stroke and a blood clot, possibly because his immune system had been weakened through prescription drug abuse and an unhealthy lifestyle, and more than forty books and twenty documentaries by or about Gould would seem to back this conclusion. But now, nearly three decades later, we discover through this book perhaps another important cause of his demise — heartsickness.

In his last seven years, Gould suffered an unprecedented string of heartbreaks with women, beginning with the death of his mother, Flora, in 1975, and reportedly ending with a marriage rejection from Birgit Johansson, a piano teacher in Stockholm, several days before his stroke. Oh why couldn’t I have given him the time? Was it because of me he died? the charismatic Johansson told relatives. Why didn’t I do more for him?

Sandwiched between the loss of Gould’s two beloved piano teachers were the collapse of his ten-year affair with Cornelia Foss, the wife of famous composer Lukas Foss, and two shadowy relationships which ended mysteriously — with soprano Roxolana Roslak and pianist Monica Gaylord. Don’t tell anybody about me and Glenn, Gaylord told Gould’s assistant at his funeral.

Many of these relationships were painful enough for the sensitive Gould, but perhaps even more so because he kept them secret. He confided in no one when they fell apart, often due to his own emotional shortcomings and personal demands.

Gould, who told friends he would not live past fifty, may have known what was coming. Some evidence of this is seen in the two recordings of his signature Goldberg Variations. In the twenty-six years between those records, released in 1956 and 1982, something happened to Gould, and even he saw it. In the early 1980s, while reviewing his initial recording, Gould remarked, I could not recognize, or identify with, the spirit of the person who made that recording. It really seemed like some other person, some other spirit had been involved. In this statement, Gould seemed to be admitting what many people thought impossible — that Gould had matured, had been swayed by his life experiences and by the outside world to the point his spirit had changed. There is additional video evidence to support the changes in the two Gould-berg signatures. A 1964 film shows a spritely Gould as a hip artist on a more passionate, hopeful mission — a man in a hurry to get somewhere. Perhaps what helped to change Gould through the years was the ebb and flow of his personal life, the bumps and the bruises of his romances with Foss, Roslak and Johansson, and with piano instructor Franny Batchen in the 1950s. The turmoil in those relationships was something that perhaps affected his music as well. And yet, Gould’s clandestine, somewhat eccentric romances were not all sad songs. They seemed to enrich his life and his art in positive ways, giving to both deeper meaning, spiced with emotions he reluctantly was forced to acknowledge.

Meanwhile, long after his death, Gould still lures new listeners to his piano, connecting with them on a haunting, personal level. He feels and you feel, says New York writer Nicole Audrey. I can feel his pain and joy — it touches me. He speaks directly to me. But during his career, just who was Gould playing for? His audience? Himself? His demanding mother? All are likely true, but he was also richly inspired by — and bared his soul at the keyboard to — a secret society of women, the girlfriends who stirred his hard-to-fetch feelings, compelled him to propose marriage and acted as sounding boards and motivators for his unforgettable interpretations of the classics and his own compositions. They were the voices, the silent chorus behind the solitary genius.

Fast-forward to a snowy, warm-as-toast-in-your-parka kind of December day in 2006, the sort of day that Glenn Gould would have adored, when the first seed for this book was planted. My granddaughter, Skye, and I tossed crumbs on the frozen ground to pigeons in a small park in midtown Toronto. She looked up innocently at a sign that read: GLENN GOULD PARK.

Who was he, Papa? she asked.

He was a famous pianist from years ago.

Who was he, Papa? Skye repeated.

Beyond his famous music, I knew that some of Gould’s appeal was his eccentricity and the mystery surrounding his private life, that he supposedly gave up his earthly pleasures for his art as a monk might do, but I suspected there was more to his story. An inquisitive writer/researcher for four decades, I was not satisfied with the answer I had given my granddaughter and I decided to find out more. My timing was good — when I discovered that 2007 was the twenty-fifth anniversary of Gould’s death and seventy-fifth anniversary of his birth — I decided to write a freelance feature story about Gould for the Toronto Star. My initial research revealed a wide-held cliché: a man who bared his soul at the piano stool, touching everyone who heard him play, but the rest of the time protected himself in a cocoon of hats and overcoats. Gould was uncomfortable with people touching his skin, perhaps affected by Asperger’s Syndrome, a variant of autism, which can make a person shy — a control freak who could not live without a structured, solitary life. Of the books and documentaries about Gould, each has added its piece to the puzzle, mostly regarding the musical enigma and his phobias, but I do not think they tell us enough about the man, the spiritual, emotional and romantic soul, who was one of the greatest Canadians of all time. We still do not really know what made him tick or why he appeals to us, his millions of listeners. His music moves people and they want to know more about what made him so sensitive, about his heart, and if in ways he was like them.

More than a quarter century after his death, Gould’s sexuality remains largely a mystery to his fans who still wonder about him on Internet blogs. Never during his lifetime was Gould publicly linked to a woman. He never married and usually cut people off if they talked about his private life. This led people to assume he had something to hide and was gay or bisexual. It is interesting to note that, while previous biographers have been timid about touching upon Gould’s romantic life, they forged ahead with other embarrassing details about his health, habits and psyche.

Gould was mum about the influence of his personal life on his music; of the Glenn Gould Reader, a collection of the pianist’s thoughts and writings published after his death, Canadian composer and music educator R. Murray Schafer said, [Its index] contains hundreds of names from the world of music, entertainment and letters, but no names of relatives, teachers or student friends.

In general terms, Gould was private. I guess it’s all part of my fantasy to develop to the fullest extent a kind of Howard Hughesian secrecy, he said. I’m a very private person, I think.

Added Gould’s friend, violinist and conductor Yehudi Menuhin, No supreme pianist has ever given of his heart and mind so overwhelmingly while showing himself so sparingly.

After finding Cornelia Foss in New York in 2007 following a six-month search involving Gould’s old friends and colleagues, I started to doubt the long-held belief that Gould was asexual. She told me that Gould was a good lover during their long affair in the 1960s and 1970s. After my feature story about Gould and Foss appeared in the Toronto Star on August 25, 2007, a rival newspaper, the Globe and Mail, chastised biographers for not broaching his interpersonal relationships and for ignoring the contribution of the women who helped to shape his life and perhaps his music. There are many women who are just left out of history because they’ve been left in the shadows, Kathy Chamberlain, chair of the steering committee for the Writing Women’s Lives project at the City University of New York, was quoted in the Globe and Mail article. Often . . . the woman is also creative and perhaps has played the role of muse.

Indeed, Gould’s women seem to show a reflection of him in their images. Until now, biographers have focused more on trying to explain what came out of his music box, not about the engine that drove it. The vault to his private life has largely remained locked since his untimely death in 1982 for a number of reasons: his obsession with privacy and controlling his image, the loyalty of his carefully chosen friends and lovers as well as the choice that biographers made to predominantly focus safely on his music and eccentricities. It is hardly surprising that a full-blown biography of Gould, including details of his romances, has never been published until now (Kevin Bazzana’s Wondrous Strange came closest). After all, the first true biography of the first prime minister of Canada wasn’t published until 2007 (John A: The Man Who Made Us, by Richard Gwyn, Random House Canada).

Now, through the memories of Gould’s girlfriends and soul-mates, we will see a fresh portrait of the brilliant pianist, revealing tenderness, compassion and even some romance. He was a man who not only tried to survive his uncomfortable body on earth, but who actually enjoyed much of it. His music was twelve-tonal and his documentaries contrapuntal — meaning that both were filled with overlapping voices — and so was his private life. When some romances ended, his obsession and jealousy, even coldness, revealed itself. But in his relationships with people like Franny Batchen there is a kindness, a remembrance of her that lasted decades. Through these women, the reader will view Gould’s famous fears and phobias through a different lens — his fear of people, of flying, of eating, of confrontation, of commitment and the potential to have children. A person with serious phobias can function professionally, but if one does not get help it can catch up with you, as it often does with the thirteen percent of the population that suffers from a phobia.

This is not a book about sex (though there is sex in it). Rather, I think it reveals Gould as a much more complete person than we previously thought — emotionally, spiritually, socially and sexually. He was not so much a self-contained fortress who could live without people, sustained only by his otherworldly music, not always a soloist. My findings, based on interviews with more than one hundred people, are that he was at the same time both very different and very everyday — he loved and lost and, yes, touched and was touched. He kissed and cried, and he also won many victories, including personal triumphs, and showed warmth as a surrogate father and would-be husband. And he was an unofficial teacher to many young musicians, helping them get their careers on track. You will see a lot of buts and yets in this book because Gould was a study in paradoxes and contrasts. Almost anything you could say about Glenn Gould, you could say the opposite and have it be somewhat true, said his writer friend Tim Page.

The story of Gould’s various romances was not an easy one to get; indeed, Gould seemed to have relationships with women who were loyal to his wish for privacy. Except for Gladys (Shenner) Riskind, none of them came forward readily to help me with this project; I approached all of the others and in some cases it took much debate to convince them to talk about their relationships. Until I contacted her in London in 2007, Batchen had never given an interview about her romance with Gould more than fifty years previous. In her 1995 book about performance anxiety, The Confidence Quotient, Batchen mentioned Gould only in quoting one of his musical techniques; she never wrote about the intense personal connection she had had with him. Verna (Sandercock) Post was so private about her romance with Gould, she did not even inform her boss Walter Homburger (Gould’s agent) about it. In the following chapters it will become clear just how tight-lipped pianist Monica Gaylord still remains about her friendship with Gould.

I have many people to thank in the acknowledgments at the end of this book, starting with Batchen (the late Frances Barrault), Riskind, Post, Foss, Roslak and many others who talked openly with me. I would have loved to have had follow-up, in-person interviews with Foss and Roslak, but they declined.

Along with this book, I have contributed initial research and consulting for a documentary on Gould’s inner life by White Pine Pictures, based in Toronto, and producers Peter Raymont and Michele Hozer, Genius Within: The Inner Life of Glenn Gould. In 2008, Cornelia Foss painted several portraits of Glenn Gould, one of which she displayed on a website (www.cbfosspaintings.com). It shows a slightly different take on the eccentric all wintered up in his signature driving cap, gloves and scarf: his expression seems less foreboding, softer, cheekier and more human than the pianist history has come to know. This, I think, is one of the views we get of him in The Secret Life of Glenn Gould.

He demanded love and affection from both his parents and happily received it at his mother’s knee, where after long hours of [piano] practice, he would lay his head and demand pats as one would give a dog.

— Gould’s cousin Jessie Greig

Chapter ONE

FLORA

The first woman in Glenn Gould’s life was Florence Emma Greig. They called her Flora or Florrie and she was born on Halloween, in 1891, in Mount Forest, Ontario. She boasted deep Scottish roots, supposedly descended from a Scottish tribe, the MacGregors, a warlike clan of the eighteenth century. Flora was a distant cousin of Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg, and of William Lyon Mackenzie, the first mayor of Toronto and leader of the Upper Canada Rebellion in 1837.

Flora’s family eventually moved to Uxbridge, Ontario, where she would meet her husband Russell Herbert Bert Gold, who had mostly English ancestors and some Scottish. Bert was nine years younger than Flora when they married on her birthday in 1925 in the new United Church of Canada. The Greigs were Presbyterian and the Golds Methodist before the United Church absorbed Canadians of both denominations. The couple moved to a middle-class house at 32 Southwood Drive in Toronto’s Beach district, where her only child, Glenn Herbert Gold, was born on September 25, 1932, during the Great Depression, when she was nearly forty-one. The baby came after several miscarriages and, according to his father, was the answer to a prayer. Flora hoped little Glenn would one day become a concert pianist, as her own dreams to become a concert pianist did not materialize; in fact, she had a theory that an unborn child’s brain could be influenced by his mother’s environment. Before Glenn was born, she filled her days and nights with music, playing piano and organ, singing and listening to the phonograph and the radio. These days, some scientists believe this technique actually works.

The family changed its name to Gould in 1939 when Glenn was seven, reportedly because they did not want to be mistaken as Jewish in the contentious wartime climate. Flora and Bert were hardworking, upright and decent people of high morals, but they did not show their emotions and at times could even be prudish and cold. They looked older than their ages and could have passed for Glenn’s grandparents. In the eyes of those who knew them, the Goulds gave Glenn a world-class education in music and a less-than-primary education in life. They exposed him to the premier musicians and teachers, but did not instruct him in the fundamentals of personal feelings and social skills, neglecting to acclimatize him to the things that would become fearful monsters later in his life — germs, crowds, confrontations, other people’s opinions and romance. As devout Christians, Flora and Bert made Glenn’s second home the church, where he made his public debut playing hymns on the organ. As an adult, he recalled services with evening light filtered through stained glass windows, ending with ministers who conducted their benedictions with the phrase, ‘Lord, give us the peace that the earth cannot give.’ His debut was apt, for early in parenthood, the Goulds had begun to worship a secondary deity — Master Glenn. When his mother realized he had perfect pitch and could command a piano while his friends were out whacking each other with hockey sticks, she began to believe he was a special gift to the world, perhaps even the reincarnation of a composer — and she told him so. In doing so, some people believe, she may have laid the groundwork for his subsequent self-worship.

From the beginning, Glenn was much closer to his mother than his father. Into adolescence he called her Mama. Physically, Flora was frail and unattractive, sometimes anxious and perhaps a hypochondriac, whereas Glenn was generally healthy, but a little fragile with poor posture. Robert Fulford, who lived next door to the Gould family, was one of Glenn’s best friends in their youth. He recalls Gould being healthy, but that his mother was too doting — perhaps planting the seeds of hypochondria that colored his adult life. When other children wore T-shirts, she bundled him up in sweaters; when they drank Kool-Aid, Glenn was given cod liver oil on a silver spoon; when others went gleefully to the midway at the Canadian National Exhibition, Flora kept her son home and away from all those free-floating germs. She even frowned upon things like sports and sleigh rides. The skinny Gould was not macho and avoided hockey and baseball; this may have been one reason why he had a cool relationship with his father, who was more sporting, an outdoorsman who built the family’s summer cottage on Lake Simcoe. Not only did Glenn not know one end of a hammer from the other, he was a pacifist and did not like his father’s fur business; his strong will eventually convinced his father to stop fishing.

Gould found school a most unhappy experience. He said, I got along miserably with most of my teachers and all of my fellow students. I suppose the fact that after school I didn’t go out to play hockey and could only play the piano gave me a feeling that music was a thing apart . . . representing a sort of means to isolation. It is possible that young Glenn never became accustomed to other children and social structure because he was allowed to take so much time off school. In second grade at Williamson Road School, he was absent forty-two days with supposed illnesses, which some biographers have traced to his mother’s over-protectiveness and to the boy’s anxiety when separated from her. This situation would continue into adolescence when, according to Gould’s cousin Jessie Greig, he demanded love and affection from both his parents and happily received it at his mother’s knee, where after long hours of [piano] practice, he would lay his head and demand pats as one would give a dog. Greig, who was six years older than Gould and watched him grow up, added that these pats were a reward for a day well spent and a fulfillment of his great need for love and acceptance.

As an only child, Glenn did not have to share things and was spoiled, even by his own account. His mother was always there for him, even when he didn’t need her, and this may have caused some friction, competition and jealousy between his parents. At about age twelve, Gould told Fulford that at the family cottage, he would sleep with his mother one night and his father would sleep with her the next — this arrangement having been worked out some years before, Fulford said. Both Flora and Bert were amateur musicians and singers who enjoyed performing at church, Bert playing violin, and Flora the piano and the organ. From the time Glenn was four years old until eleven, he had his mother as his music and piano teacher. She was described as a nurturing teacher, but she was strict and did not allow Glenn to play wrong notes or to add his personal touch to passages. As young as three, Gould showed remarkable skill: while sitting on his mother’s lap he had perfect pitch. By five, he could play songs she had taught him and could even create some of his own. He boldly announced, I’m going to become a concert pianist. Later, he would become known for his precision at the keyboard. He likely had his mother to thank for that, and yet, as Flora spent four to six hours a day with her son at the piano, his work strangely was never good enough for her. The Goulds could afford to spend money on Glenn’s training because Bert’s furrier business was lucrative, and so they enrolled Glenn at age eleven with revered teacher Alberto Guerrero, a former concert pianist. At thirteen, Gould made his debut on the organ during a concert in Toronto and received sparkling reviews.

Through his adolescence, Glenn deeply loved his mother, and they would exchange innocent Valentine’s Day cards until he was at least twelve, but they were both strong personalities and sometimes came to loggerheads. During an argument with her, Glenn got angry and worried that he might cause her bodily harm, but he held back and became ashamed of the emotions he had felt. The experience caused him to retreat into serious introspection and, when he emerged, he swore to himself that he would never let that inner rage reveal itself again, said Andrew Kazdin, Gould’s record producer in New York in the 1960s and 1970s. He was determined that he would live his life practicing self-control. Indeed, even as a child, Gould rarely cried — if he fell in the schoolyard, he would hum to himself to block the pain. Like other boys, he was gangly and awkward in his early teens, but eventually grew into his big ears; he took longer, however, growing in other ways.

A loner with few friends, at age thirteen Gould had a number of pets — a budgie named Mozart, four goldfish, Chopin, Haydn, Bach and Beethoven, and an English setter, Nicky — and he also brought home stray pets. By the time I was six, he later said, I’d already made an important discovery: that I get along much better with animals than with humans.

On a secondary level, young Gould had a number of grandparents, aunts, uncles and nannies in and out of his life. He said he grew up amongst very elderly people, uncles and aunts and grandparents, as well as his parents, and that it affected him, said Father Owen Carroll, a Catholic priest and teacher, who was Gould’s friend for many years after they met in 1955. They were Protestant and Presbyterian. He said that, because of that, he didn’t really know young people. And yet, black-and-white pictures from the cottage, which have been widely circulated through books and magazines, could have been fashioned by Norman Rockwell, showing young Glenn full of summer smiles, sometimes in suit and tie, with floppy-eared dogs and unidentified boys at his side. Perhaps it was what his parents wanted others to see, or what he wanted others to see — the beginning of image making. What the photos do not show are the introvert, the artsy geek roughed up by bullies.

As a teenager at Malvern Collegiate Institute, Gould was often absent, spending much time studying music at the Royal Conservatory of Music and being tutored at home by a teacher. Gould said he disliked high school, partly because he did not want to be forced into being social. Dr. Helen Mesaros — a psychiatrist who published a book in 2008, Bravo Fortissimo Glenn Gould: The Mind of a Canadian Virtuoso — believes Gould skipped his youth and became repressed socially and sexually while putting most of his time and energy into his classical music. He spurned jazz and popular music, possibly partly because they represented the public airing of emotions and the lyrics often talked of everyday life. Into his teens, he did not date girls or attend sock-hop dances. The loss of the opportunity to dance, play and sing popular music, to engage in youthful fashion and other teenage behavior left him with unfinished business from this stage of development, she said. Mesaros added that Gould may have been threatened by the emergence of his instinctual drives for romance and instead resorted to an ascetic lifestyle with a heavy emphasis on his intellectual and creative pursuits. She believes that he never had a serious romantic relationship during his life, except with the piano. (Of course, in her research, Mesaros was not privy to the findings of this book — that Gould began courting women fairly seriously, albeit secretly, when he was about twenty.)

In adulthood, Gould would refer to his childhood as happy. In the two-storey, middle-class home on Southwood Drive, among the maple trees swaying with breezes from Lake Ontario, the young Gould lived in relative solitude and could be free to create without the stifling opinions of peer pressure. At the cottage near Uptergrove, Ontario, a ninety-minute drive north of Toronto, Gould loved walking the countryside with dogs and playing piano until all hours of the night. He admitted he grew up a little puritan in his thinking. In the 1930s and 1940s, Toronto was much smaller and less cosmopolitan than it is today and, with a strong British flavor and peaceful, private people, it became known as Toronto the Good. Gould despised loud colors, especially red, which he deemed aggressive, and loved black-and-white movies. It’s possible that Gould got an idealistic view of life, women, animals, nature and music from his mother. It seems to be a myth, however, and one not discouraged by Glenn himself, that he did not have other influences on his life and music apart from his mother and German composers. For instance, Guerrero, who taught Gould for nine years, obviously had a big sway on his style; Gould became known for sitting in a low

Reviews for Secret Life of Glenn Gould, The

[karhne · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This book is very well written--so much so, that at times I found myself falling in love with a pianist who was known for his neuroses. It's obvious that the book was well researched, and that Clarkson took a sensitive approach to a very private side of a very quiet person. The book's major shortcoming is the angle from which it is written, or perhaps even the subject matter, itself. It presents Gould as a serial monogamist, and we have the misfortune to watch him fall in love and build up tentative relationships only to destroy them with his foibles and fastidiousness. He does this over and over and over again with a laundry list of women of varying degrees of fame, and as a result the book becomes tedious. There is not enough focus on Gould's other goals and achievements to keep it from also being, in my view, rather depressing.